Top 4 Modular SAN Solutions 2017

IT Central Station’s crowdsourced user review platform helps technology decision makers around the world to better connect with peers and other independent experts, who provide advice without vendor bias.

Our users rank top modular SAN tools according to their valuable features; discussing which solutions they've used previously, and how their current tool of choice could further improve their organizations' flash-storage needs.

#1 HPE 3PAR Flash Storage

HPE 3PAR Flash Storage is ranked by our users as the number one tool of Q2 2017, but what do users really think of the solution?

“I don't know that you could improve on the 3PAR very much, other than maybe the 3PAR management console. It's kind of an old school console, it's not web-based. It's a fat client that you have to install. It would be nice to have a web-based version that I could go anywhere too, versus having to go back to the 3PAR management console.”

#2 Nutanix

Nutanix is ranked by our users as the number two modular SAN solution of Q2 2017.

“The Prism interface is valuable. It is very easy to manage, is based on HTML5, and all CVMs are able to assume the management role. They are not the SPOF.

Nutanix makes it easier for us to grow as the organization needs more resources. We can add more blocks and nodes in a granular way. This is unlike a traditional infrastructure that is initially invested in for 4 or 5 years.”

“One of the best features of the VNX is the ability to combine drives of different types into a virtual Storage Pool. By combining small but fast flash drives, SAS drives, and high-capacity but slower NL-SAS drives, the VNX can intelligently move data to the different tiers of storage based on usage. This maximizes performance and investment by making sure commonly accessed data is stored in flash, while rarely-accessed data can be sent to the NL-SAS drives.”

“It gives us the flexibility to work with all protocols on the same Storage Box. The WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout) is the best feature implemented on this storage solution. Also, the DataONTAP is very reliable and stable, and I haven't had any problems yet. If you configure NetApp using the best practices, you should not have any issues with the performance.

Lastly, the deduplication works very well with all applications in a VMware environment, and you will save a lot of space. In my experience, we save more than 80% of the space using deduplication on the volume, and if you have All-Flash FAS , you will have gain of the 3:1 and 4:1 on your storage on the whole environment without lost performance.”

“We need to have a way to do some tests only because to do testing we really need to failover to the second site, destroy everything, rebuild it, and failback.

I really need a test mode that is not as destructive, at least. There is no test mode. Maybe there is with ONTAP 9. I’m not sure. That’s probably a feature that doesn’t figure into the short-term roadmap.”